Questions Regarding the Shirts and Membership

Friday, 18 June 2004

How’s It Going?

I’ll do some more self-promotion during the remainder of the funding
drive, but for now I’ll simply state this: your support during this
drive can make this a better site. It’s that simple.

My thanks to everyone who’s already signed up.

International Shipping

By far the most frequent question thus far is from readers outside
North America asking how they can pay for shipping for T-shirts.

Admittedly, I failed to make this clear in the funding drive
announcement, but it is my intention to ship shirts anywhere in the
world for the flat price of $30.72 (USD). When notified of this
policy via email, several inordinately generous European and
Australian readers insisted upon donating an extra $5 to cover the
shipping. Such friendliness and generosity is remarkable.

But to be clear, extra shipping charges are not required for
overseas orders. If you would like to chip in an extra couple of
bucks to cover it, that’d be grand, but it isn’t necessary. (Just
use the PayPal donation field after placing your shirt order.)

Payment Alternative to PayPal

A number of readers have written regarding problems incurred with
PayPal. The most common problem involves long-dormant PayPal
accounts creating using email addresses which are no longer active,
but which prevent you from using the same credit card that’s
assigned to the now-dormant (and thus unusable) account. Others have
reported browser incompatibilities, including one reader who was
gracious enough to go through the entire ordering process three
times, only to have it fail at the end of each attempt.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the services provided by PayPal. Their
“Instant Payment Notification” API is the hook that allows me to
automate the creating and emailing of membership keys, using my own
script. And, earlier this year, PayPal removed their long-standing
restriction that required you to sign up for a PayPal account just
to make a payment. It’s also the case that PayPal’s transaction fees
are remarkably low. (They really do operate on a “make it up on
volume” business model.)

That said, I certainly don’t want anyone to miss out on all the
membership fun simply because they can’t/won’t/would prefer not to
use PayPal. Thus, I’m happy to announce the Daring Fireball web
store at eSellerate.

If you tried using PayPal to place an order and it failed, I’d be
very much appreciative if you were willing to try again using
eSellerate.

Cat Pictures

Lastly, this segment of the funding drive announcement prompted
several questions:

No, one way or another, Daring Fireball will continue. But
if the income I derive here remains at the hobbyist level,
I’m only going to be able to devote a hobbyist amount of
time to it, which is significantly less time than what I’ve
poured into it to date. In short, a hobby-level Daring
Fireball will resemble much more a typical weblog —
blurb-length posts, often only to link to articles
elsewhere. No cat pictures, but still.